Well, here's a somewhat analogous precedent: The US (and other nations) have been fighting piracy in the Horn of Africa area for several years now. No declare

Well, here's a somewhat analogous precedent: The US (and other nations) have been fighting piracy in the Horn of Africa area for several years now. No declared war (by anybody - it's not just the US that didn't), but pirates are being killed. So the precedent is there that this is how we do things. It's not just this operation. (If you don't like that, what do you want? Do you want to require that the military get Congressional approval for every operation in which someone might get killed?) At least (just today), some members of Congress finally got briefed on the classified intel that leads people to think that these are in fact drug smugglers getting killed. Look, I'm not saying that bombing these boats is justified. I'm just saying that the Congressional oversight rules are not unique to this operation.